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Backyard Pilgrim: Webinar & pilgrimage Cohorts
The idea of pilgrimage has been part of many faith traditions through the years, including Christianity. It often is an experience that comes with a deep sense of solemnity and purpose, along with a desire for wonder and discovery. People spend great deals of money and time traveling to distant places in order to have these supernatural encounters. But, what if a similar experience could be possible right where you live – right in your own backyard?
We invite you to join us in the journey of becoming Backyard Pilgrims this February as we enter into the Lenten season. Starting the week of February 19, we will be running two book study groups that will be walking through the book, Backyard Pilgrim, by Matt Canlis. Groups will meet once a week, over the course of 6 weeks to discuss what they are learning and how they are seeing God at work in their lives and in their neighbourhood.
In preparation for the groups, you’re invited to join us for a webinar with Matt Canlis, January 23rd at 10:00am Pacific. During the webinar you’ll get the opportunity to hear a bit more about Matt’s journey and we’ll explain more about what the Backyard Pilgrim journey looks like in our cohorts.
For more information on the book or the Godspeed video, visit their website, or take some time to watch an interview that Cam did with Matt in 2021.
Sign up for the webinar or complete this form to join one of the cohorts.
LEARNING COMMUNITIES
STRONGER TOGETHER
It’s no secret that the Western world is in throes of change. North America is quickly abandoning its Judeo-Christian heritage for secularism. In a blog posting by Dr. John Stackhouse in reference to the 2011 Statistics Canada census data, he makes the following observation. “The tight link between Canada and Christian piety has evaporated as Canadians have raced the Dutch for the fastest deChristianization since the French Revolution… The national story is simply a quiet revolution of slow but sure abandonment of Christian identity by older people and an increasing number of younger people who have never known the inside of a church and are in no hurry to see it.”
How does the church navigate this change? It seems that there are no experts but there are fellow travellers. The answer to the way we navigate the shifting cultural tide is together.
Forge Canada invites you to join a monthly community of fellow leaders to journey with, learn from and process the cultural context we are now a part of.
A Forge Learning Community (FLC) is a monthly priority for missional practitioners and leaders.
What can you expect?
Because we will lean upon each other to grow and learn there are three expectations of those who subscribe to the FLC:
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Show up – Once a month for 3 hours commit your time to being with the FLC. Trust can only be built as we are together and to get to the heart of our most pressing challenges will require trust.
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Be present – We encourage everyone to come prepared. There may be times when we will discuss articles or books come having read and prepared to dialogue intelligently. There will be times when we carry burdens that distract come prepared to share so we can carry them together.
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Engage – Come willing to participate. We might provide the voice of others who have deeper insight or more experienced but every voice is needed to help process what we are hearing and apply it to our own specific contexts.
What’s expected of you? Show up, be present and engage.
What does a Learning Community do?
The short answer is that we learn. Not only by having wise voices speak to us either live or virtually, but also by putting into practice what is being learned and sharing our experiences with each other. We learn by acting and reflecting and the FLC allows a venue to process this learning cycle.
For more information, send us an email.
PRAYER
YOUR KINGDOM COME.
We are convinced that prayer is crucial to our participation with what God is doing across our country. Our desire is to see God continue to lead us towards being a “Faithful Witness” in neighbourhoods across our land.
We want to invite you to participate in our prayer initiative. In order to simplify all of this, we are using the Echo Prayer App. We would invite you to download the app, and then click on feeds, and then search for Forge Canada and click “follow”.
This app will allow us to communicate the needs in seeing more neighbourhood communities of Christians being developed, but also alert you to opportunities to pray for the Forge movement as we speak and teach, train and equip followers of Jesus across the country.
We would welcome your participation in journeying with God in seeing His Kingdom come here in Canada and so invite you to join us.
